


Fading Into Grey

by zeesqueere



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: Dissociation, Implied Sexual Content, Mild Gore, Other, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-07
Updated: 2020-01-07
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:22:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22145587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zeesqueere/pseuds/zeesqueere
Summary: So much of your relationship has been built around lies of convenience. The world has conspired against the both of you enough times over that you agreed the rest is all better left unsaid. After all, there will always be a next time.
Relationships: Diaraye Cadash/Feofan Ruádhan, Original Female Character/Original Non-Binary Character
Comments: 6
Kudos: 9





	Fading Into Grey

**Author's Note:**

  * For [doji_oji](https://archiveofourown.org/users/doji_oji/gifts), [sass_bot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sass_bot/gifts).



> Special thanks to @doji_oji and @sass_bot for editing and workshopping this piece with me.
> 
> I swear you've been changing  
> How long can I try to pretend  
> That it's all in my head  
> 'Cause I just don't want to forget what we were feeling  
> —“Fading Into Grey,” Billy Lockett

You can’t help but notice the grey creeping along the edges of their hair. From stress perhaps, you muse to yourself. Their eyes seem to catch you, however, and they comment that premature greyness runs in their family. The simple admission stings like a slap. 

So much of your relationship has been built around lies of convenience; it only works when you both agree to pretend that you have no families to tie your hands, that you haven’t already devoted the best parts of yourselves to something larger than this relationship, that there are no other lovers in the wings, and that the walls around your hearts have garden gates rather than barbed wire. The world has conspired against the both of you enough times over that you agreed the rest is all better left unsaid.

You maintain polite fictions that need only last the duration of one visit at a time. Some nights you climb through the window and into their arms; you pretend that you’ve managed to climb into their life forever, but you inevitably set that notion aside with the breaking of dawn. Some nights find them inexplicably absent from their quarters and you agree to yourself you won’t bring it up next time. After all, there will always be a next time, even if it doesn’t circle back around for days or years. 

* * *

The pamphlets are wonderfully written; still, you know deep down that the Circle is here to stay. You remind yourself they were Harrowed long before the two of you met and hope that remains enough. When another body is pulled from the Gallows in the dead of night, you lie to yourself that it was ever enough in the first place.

You know Templars. You have been to trade deals, to dinners, and even to bed with Templars. You lie there against the too-perfect sheets and think, instead, about your mage with cool hands, greying temples, and sad eyes. You find other ways to keep their name off your tongue, but all you taste is bile. 

The grievances accumulate despite your best efforts. The lies grow thinner with time, slowly revealing uncomfortable truths neither of you prepared to face: the families, the empty rooms, the pamphlets, the Templars. Their allegiance shifted somewhere along the way and you were gone too long to catch it. You were gone. You were gone but their bed stayed warm. Hurt after hurt after hurt. 

This was never built to last. They were never meant to mean anything at all to you, but you lay there on the sheets still crisp and regulation-tucked and you think about those sad grey eyes staring right into you as you warm a different bed.

* * *

Their heart is filled with rebellion now. You see the pamphlets tucked under their blankets more tenderly than a lover, and you suspect that whatever still remains between you both now hangs on the edge of a knife. You stay silent, saying nothing as the cheap ink presses into your back. They lie grey and sad in your arms, fire and fight full to bursting inside their heart. Their hands are warm now. 

_The pamphlets are still beautiful_ , you think to yourself as you scrub ink smears from your skin. You remember the bodies in the dark. You remember callused hands in the afternoon quiet of the barracks. You remember the lyrium deals made over dinners; the blood you’ve been ordered to spill so your handlers may dine their fill on the deaths of countless others—other mages that look up from their pyres and stare at you with sad grey eyes. 

You make your decision.

* * *

The lies are different now. You trade idle visions of warm hands and grey hair for grunted answers to deceptively benign questions, and set yourself to memorizing maps and schedules out of the corners of your eyes. You befriend fishermen, bounty hunters, package handlers, tariff collectors, city guardsmen, smugglers, and anyone else that seems useful. You hope it will be enough.

They do not— _cannot_ —understand. It’s safer this way. It hurts worse than you expected, but you bear it in silence. You’re so close now. They’re so close to free and they don’t even know. _They cannot know_ , you remind yourself yet again. They’re safer this way. You ignore the voice in your head pronouncing you a coward. It sounds far too much like your eldest brother. You sit up in your bed and instead imagine how it would feel to have that grey mage of yours here in the warmth with you, but only the echoes of mocking cruelty from half a lifetime ago fill the void in answer.

* * *

The fire has spread everywhere. Flames such as you’ve never known seem to swallow any remaining darkness, burning the Hightown streets almost as an afterthought. Hot curling tongues of smoke sweep across your skin and fill your mouth. You force yourself to imagine the searing hot caresses come not from the destruction all around you but instead from a lover made of grey. Luckily for you, practice has made perfect. When the tears begin to prick at your eyes, it’s in imagined reunion.

_So close now_. Your careful planning may have come to naught, perhaps, but you watch that plan go up in flames and plant something else in its ashes. This is revolution. This is rebirth.

Hope against hope; Stone and memory serve so that you find them even in the confusion. Their grey eyes burn as they claim your mouth with a hunger that a city on fire cannot match.

_There’s no time_ , you want to say, but they only respond _there’s no time like the present_. Something about the set of their sad eyes stops you from arguing.

* * *

The Templars are coming, you realize a moment too late. Their hand is in yours, but a lifetime of being on the run still hasn’t elongated your stride and they don’t know how to compensate for the discrepancy. You pull them along one of your favorite escape routes—a mistake, as it turns out.

_Too late_ , the Stone cries to you, but you are a child of the sun and rain as much as any other surfacer, and you spit at Her cries. The Templar flinches and wipes his face in distaste, buying the two of you a moment more. 

A moment, maybe, but not a lifetime. A tug, a thud, a gurgle, and suddenly nothing more than a handful of air. You spin as if underwater—as if time itself has slowed so that the spaces between heartbeats stretches on into small eternities; stretches until it snaps. You watch them fall: the grey-eyed mage that was almost yours. 

* * *

You watch the Templar pull his sword free and swipe it clean. You remember his callused hands and the way he held your wrists; it’s the same way he holds his hilt as his blade and his gaze both flick towards you. Recognition is a two-way street, and the Templar pales, unaccustomed to the face you wear as hunter rather than lover. 

It is almost too easy to disarm him, this Templar with callused hands, the man that murdered your mage. It is almost too easy to repay blood with blood. Almost. Its ease does not stop you, you who have killed for far less. There is no coin in this death, no formal contract to settle, but you turn his own steel against him and watch his blood slip through the cracks in the paved street. The Stone drinks your kill in silence.

* * *

You turn back to your mage. Their hands are cool and your heart freezes to match. So much has been left unsaid and all that’s left to show for it is a set of grey eyes suddenly too dull to find yours. You brush their lids closed and lean down, lying to yourself one last time as you whisper a too-late truth into a deceptively round ear. 

The very color seems to bleed from their body, cold corpse on the cobblestones of an ash-gray city street. You cradle them in your blood-covered arms, rocking from the force of your sobs. You cannot stay here in the street with a dead Templar not more than a few paces away, but the city is burning and it feels like your funeral pyre. 

The grey continues to creep across their features. Grey skin over grey eyes, grey hair darkening with blood and ash and a torrent of your tears.

* * *

You cannot stay here. Armored footsteps are growing closer, louder, heavier. There will be more Templars soon, each of them with callused hands ready to strike down mages and their supporters. You cannot stay. 

You pull them closer. Let them come. The blood on your hands will surely move them to retribution. One of their own lies in the street mere feet away, his blood slowly feeding the Stone but failing to slake your bloodlust. Let them come. You want to learn how many more you can kill before they cut you down like a dog—like a mage—in the street. Like your mage. 

You pull yourself to your feet, sparing another long look at the grey corpse of your lover before adjusting your grip on the Templar’s sword. Let them come. 

* * *

No more Templars come. The Order has been pushed out of the city, if the voices on the street outside your dark house are to be trusted. Apparently, there’s a red lyrium corpse to prove it; you have no desire to return to the Gallows and see it for yourself. The mage rebellion is just beginning, but the pamphlets you once thought beautiful now crumple in your fists. Your personal revolution died in the streets alongside the grey lover with cool hands.

You’ve never personally felt the presence of the Maker, but that sad-eyed mage of yours lived their entire life in the circle. The least that you can do now is to prepare them a proper Andrastian pyre. Your premonitions come back to haunt you as you watch the fire consuming yet another body, yet another loved one. You stare into the flames for so long that the image sears itself onto the canvas of your mind and becomes all you see when you finally close your eyes. 

* * *

You bury your heart out in the rose bushes and begin to pack; Kirkwall is nothing more than a City of Chains for you now. Your past hopes are ashes that have yet to become fallow ground. So you gather your things and you step onto the fishing boat you commissioned a lifetime ago and you lie to yourself that a place on the other side of the horizon holds healing for you. You ignore the roots digging into your chest cavity and sail off into the grey morning.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic tells a tale that runs parallel to that of Hawke and their crew during the events of Dragon Age II but from the perspective of Diaraye Cadash, a surface dwarf working as an assassin and seductress for the Free Marches Carta. Her younger sister eventually becomes the Herald of Andraste and Head of the Second Inquisition... but that is a story for another day.


End file.
